Jewish Community Trends: Intermarriage
One of the biggest reasons for shrinking number of Jews in America

The upcoming marriage of Chelsea Clinton, daughter of former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, and Marc Mezvinsky, has many in the Jewish community in America wondering if Chelsea will convert to Judaism. Some other questions asked by many of these naïve Jews concern whether there will be a rabbi at the ceremony, a chuppa present and will their future children be raised Jewish, Christian, both, or nothing at all.

The Current Picture of the state of the Jewish Community in America

While exact figures are unknown, it is believed that there are between 5 and 6.5 million Jews in the United States at the present time.  What is known is that starting sometime around 1970 the Jewish population in the United States began a period of non-growth, and by the 1990s the Jewish population was slowly (and increasingly) declining. This is besides the fact that there have been hundreds of thousands of Jews from the former Soviet Union, Israel, and Latin America settling in the United States during the same period. 

Not only is the Jewish population shrinking, the Jewish population in America is also rapidly aging, and there are not nearly enough children being born to make up the difference which will soon be felt. In 1957 there were 503,000 known elderly Jews in America. In 2000 the number had more than doubled to 1,072,000 and stood at 19% of the total Jewish population. This figure will only increase within the next 20 years, as it is believed that at the present time, 16% of Jewish Americans are between the ages of 55 and 64, up from only 9% in 2000.

Further complicating the picture is the large increase in the number of Jews in America who practice Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. While only 12% of Jews in America are Orthodox Jews, 34% of Jews, aged 18-24, are Orthodox, with an even higher percentage of those under 18 Orthodox.

This is a result of the high birthrate of the Hassidic and Haredi (Ultra Orthodox) community, mostly consisting of post-WWII Eastern European Jewish immigrants and those of the Modern Orthodox and newly-Orthodox (Ba’al Teshuvah), a result of Orthodox Jewish outreach groups.

Not a New Story

However, intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews is nothing new. It’s been a fact of life for the Jewish people since the birth of the Jewish people themselves, with the Bible itself warning the Israelites against marrying with foreign peoples. The difference between today and the past is that the huge rate of intermarriage affecting today’s Jews is taking place in what was formerly the largest Jewish community in the world – the United States. After World War II, with the loss of European Jewry in the Holocaust, the Jewish community in America was by far the largest in the world.

Before the arrival of the nearly 2 million Eastern European Jews starting in the 1880s, most of the 250,000 Jews in America were born in or were the descendents of Jews from Germany. Between 1840 and 1870, nearly 200,000 German Jews migrated to the United States. However, it is known that, by the 1930s nearly 50% of the descendents of these Jews were intermarried. Most of the descendents are no longer Jewish. 

A good example of this phenomenon is my grandfather’s family who were of this German origin. Of the 20 great-grandchildren of my great-grandparents, only two of them (my brother and I) have two Jewish parents and were raised Jewish. This means that only 10% of their descendents in my generation are Jewish. The others are no longer counted among the Jewish population and have been lost to the Jewish people.

In the article in CounterPunch, Lenni Brenner (who I almost totally disagree with regarding his rhetoric on Israel) makes an interesting and very accurate picture of intermarriage: that the statistics showing an intermarriage rate of nearly 50% is in itself a vast deception:

Today, with the enormous intermarriage rate, the Jewish establishment can't face reality. They know that "slightly more than a fifth of Jewish adults who were raised by two Jewish parents are intermarried. In contrast, nearly three-quarters of Jewish adults with just one Jewish parent are intermarried. In other words, Jewish adults who are the children of intermarriages are more than three times as likely to be married to non-Jews themselves. At the same time, among those who had intermarried parents, a Jewish upbringing reduces the rate of intermarriage. Almost 60% of Jewish adults who were raised Jewish by intermarried parents are themselves intermarried, compared to 86% of their counterparts who had intermarried parents but were not raised Jewish by them."

So they stopped counting adults who convert to another monotheistic religion as Jews, and don't put kids of intermarried Jews, who aren't raised Jewish, in their 'current Jews' category, and, lo presto, they come up with the 47% figure.

Furthermore he declares:

The intermarriage rate has become such an obsession with the Jewish honchos that they overlook an even more ominous stat. Eight out of 10 Jews living with a sexual partner without benefit of clergy is sleeping with a non-Jew. But in their formalistic minds, 'only' 47%, for marriages, means that they are still in business, if in deep trouble, whereas if a majority of kids with at least one born Jewish parent intermarry, and the rest are shacking up with gentiles, "organized Jewry," as their journals call them, is unmistakably little more than the dirty ring in the bathtub after the water is gone down the drain.

For all their abracadabras, Judaism is well and truly shriveling up, everywhere except in Israel, and it doesn't matter what intermarriage percentage they concoct. Intermarriage is a symptom of the collapse of Jewry, not its cause.  

As for the future Marc and Chelsea Mezvinsky, I personally don’t think it matters if she converts or not, since even if she does convert, does anyone expect their children not to intermarry? Their daddy was more than happy to marry a gentile, why shouldn’t they? They should just enjoy life as non-Jews, since what does it really matter, their children and grandchildren most likely won’t be Jewish anyways.

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